Views 1.10 and Layouts 1.3 Improve Usability and Performance

   Amir

Announcements

August 17, 2015
33

We just released updates for all Toolset plugins for WordPress 4.3. Among this release, you will find Views 1.10 and Layouts 1.3 with big improvements to usability and performance. Views and Layouts pack more performance and features, but are also simpler to use.

Important – be sure to update all Toolset plugins

Toolset plugins share some of their functionality and have ‘shared PHP code’. If you use several Toolset plugins, be sure to update all of them together. Running older versions of one plugin with a newer version of another can cause unexpected problems. These problems will not damage your database, but will make things appear broken.

When you update, always update ALL Toolset plugins together.

Views 1.10 Highlights

Conditional output made simple

Inserting conditional output to a View
Inserting conditional output to a View

The major new feature in Views 1.10 is a brand new engine for conditional output. As of this version, when you want to create blocks that display conditionally, you no longer need to learn cryptic syntax. Use the GUI to easily create conditionally displayed blocks and choose the conditions from a convenient dialog.

Super-fast custom searches through caching

The other very exciting addition to Views 1.10 is a new caching engine for rendering Views. This makes it possible for you to display custom searches with Views on pages like the site’s homepage, without worrying about the performance.

A custom search naturally requires a lot of resources from the server. Loading content according to complex filters is expensive. This feature makes you only pay once and not on every page load. A View with a custom search will typically display all the results before inputs are set. Now, Views will remember these results, so subsequent page loads are lightening fast. Only when people actually start using your search, will your server need to run new database queries.

Reuse and control Views by setting arguments

Now, when you insert a View into content, you can set its basic settings. For example, if you create a View as a slider, you can control the number of items and their ordering. This makes it much easier to use the same View with different settings in different parts of your site. The new feature comes with a GUI, so you don’t need to memorize anything. Just insert the View and select its options.

All of Views 1.10 goodness

Views 1.10 comes with yet more great features for you. Read the Views 1.10 release notes for the complete description, screenshots and installation instructions.

Layouts 1.3 Highlights

Support for CRED user forms in upcoming CRED 1.4

Layouts CRED User Forms Insertion Dialog
Layouts CRED User Forms Insertion Dialog

Layouts got a new integration with the upcoming ‘user forms’ in CRED 1.4. We are preparing to close CRED 1.4, which will support forms for creating and editing users. Layouts 1.3 is already prepared for this.

Module Manager support for Layouts

The other major addition to Layouts 1.3 is support for our Module Manager. Now you can create modules that include all of Toolset elements, including Layouts. You can export a module with Layouts from one site and import it into your other sites.

Robust import process

We’ve updated the importer process, so that it can handle any number of layouts, without timing out. Now, we import layouts in steps and give updates during the process. This means that you can safely import layouts into existing sites and not have to worry about the importer failing due to size.

Complete compatibility with page caching

Layouts 1.3 will check if you are using page caching and will invalidate cache for content that uses layouts that you edited. This makes the content editing flow with Layouts much more natural and simple. You update a layout and that’s it. No more need to manually check for updated pages and invalidate their cache. Layouts plugin does that for you now.

Full layouts 1.3 release details

See the details in Layouts 1.3 release notes.

Complete WordPress 4.3 compatibility

This release of Toolset plugins comes just before WordPress 4.3 is out. Before you update WordPress, you should update all of Toolset plugins, to avoid any compatibility issues. WordPress 4.3 depracated a number of API functions and Toolset plugins made the necessary changes to use replacement functions.

Next for Toolset

This release of Toolset plugins wraps up a long development cycle which focused on improving the development experience with Toolset. We’ve set it our goal to make it easier to use Toolset and allow you to build sites while needing a lot less support.

Next, we continue with more powerful features for Toolset. I will write a preview of coming features and ask for your feedback on them.

Questions? Ideas? Suggestions?

We hope that you enjoy this update of Toolset plugins. If you have any questions, ideas or suggestions, leave your comments here. We love your feedback and will reply to everyone.

 

Comments 33 Responses

  1. The update crashed my site and admin. I had to reset my plugins folder. I updated types, views and access at the same time, so I don’t know which one it is. I’ll update when I’ve determined which one, and if I can figure out what plugin it’s conflicting with. Outside of Toolset, I mostly have Woocommerce, Formidable, and Yoast installed.

  2. Views is the heart of Toolset so it is good to see that there are a lot of performance and usability enhancements to Views in this release. Full support for Layouts in the Module Manager is also nice. Thank you.

  3. Some great new features in Views. I’m already making use of the new front-end event – a great enhancement.
    I can see some real core improvements here. Excellent work guys!!

  4. I can’t wait to test out the new Views. 1 thing I want to request is to continuously try to make Views faster. Reason is because the plugin already solved the main problem which is to allow users to search and filter content. The only thing that will make me happier as a user now is a fast plugin. Keep up the good work!

    • Sure. In this release, we identified the biggest speed bottleneck for Views and resolved it. Parametric search on the site’s homepage could be very expensive. Now, you will no longer feel any performance issues with it.

      If you run into anything else that Views does slow, please let us know. It’s our mission to make Toolset-based sites as least as fast as hand-coded sites.

  5. Nice update Amir. I’ll be testing and reporting.
    I saw you made improvement in the Views pagination engine. But I would like to see this pagination scheme (http://www.mejimoveis.com.br/imoveis/) added to it natively instead of having to resort to a hack. The hack, suggested in the forum, works but breaks ajax functionality which is a pity.

  6. Thank you for the updates and new features. Has documentation been updated to reflect the new features and screen shots as well?

    Thanks again!

    • Almost. The last document that we’re updating now is about the conditional HTML. The current page still talks about wpv-if shortcodes. We are completing this update and will have a new document with the new conditional HTML. Other documentation is already updated. We didn’t want to wait with this release for this last page because it’s needed for WordPress 4.3, which was supposed to be released already.

    • Great to hear. My biggest complaint about toolset has always been the outdated and sometimes confusing documentation. Looking forward to it.

  7. If we still want to write our own conditional views code, would we still use wpv-if or is there something new?

    Also, since we already have tons (TONS!) of wpv-if conditional views, will these take advantage of the performance improvements in Views 1.10?

    Thanks,
    Jeff

    • The current wpv-if shortcodes are staying in Views and we have no plans to retire them. There are thousands of sites using this syntax and we don’t want to ask people to re-engineer things.

      The documentation page for wpv-if will move to a different URL and out of the navigation tree, but it will remain in the site. It will have a link to it from the new content.

      The new syntax includes a GUI and it also includes a ‘text mode’. Let’s give the developers a couple of days to complete the new documentation. I’ll write a newsletter when it’s ready and we’ll introduce this to everyone.

      Sounds better? 🙂

    • Do you have other Toolset plugins installed on this site besides Types and Views? If so, you should update all, because there may be some common code. Anyway, our supporters will help find what’s wrong and get it fixed for you. I’ll subscribe to the support thread that you created to see that it’s resolved very soon.

  9. Only Cred is installed besides Types and Views. I don’t believe there is a new release to Cred, is there?

    • No there is not a release to Cred yet. I am waiting for CRED 1.4 as well… Need the user forms badly.

      • We released CRED 1.3.6.2, which includes minor updates for WordPress 4.3 and matches the update in Types and Views. If you update Types and/or Views, be sure to update CRED too.

        CRED 1.4 is in testing right now. I hope that this testing goes well and we can release without further delays. I’ll write to update when it’s ready.

    • Just to clarify, you should update all Toolset plugins together. Running an outdated of CRED with new versions of Types and Views will cause problems. There is no data loss, but things will stop working. If you haven’t already, please update CRED too. The current version of CRED is 1.3.6.2 and it’s specifically released to match this update of Types and Views.

      Sorry for not including this information in the blog post originally. I just updated the post to emphasize this.

      • Will running CRED 1.4 beta be okay as well? I had to update to the beta version on a production site due to a bug in the editor in which it kept disappearing, and left me unable to edit forms. This was the suggestion provided in the support forums, but it was previous to the new releases.

        • Answered my own question again, the beta doesn’t work. 1.3.6.2 fixed past issues, and the editor bug is gone.

          • We just closed CRED 1.4 today with last updates. I’ll release an update tomorrow, in parallel to starting our full QA. This beta will work fine with current versions of Types and Views.

  10. Hi Amir

    Does this mean that CRED 1.4 is due to be released? I can’t wait, because this is so important for me. Being able to have user profiles, login and registration forms in a controlled way without having to struggle with x plugins is a huge issue in my projects.

    So I hope to see an official release soon.

    • I know that this development is taking a lot longer than planned. Certainly longer than we promised it would take.

      CRED 1.4 is basically ready. Now we are working through a few small dependency issues with Types, Views and Layouts. If we cannot release stable versions of all Toolset plugins next week, we will release it all as a development package, but you will still have access to the recent CRED 1.4 – at least for development.